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That's too late! Doesn't even make sense. By 2040 they will be banned in nearly all developed world. Volvo doesn't plan to build any of them starting 2020 by th

That's too late! Doesn't even make sense. By 2040 they will be banned in nearly all developed world. Volvo doesn't plan to build any of them starting 2020 by the way (while they will still build mild hybrids, which are 80% ICE vehicles). Germany is planning a ban from 2030 and that seems spot on, by this time technology will be definitely up to it. Doing it by 2040 is same as doing nothing, because gasoline cars will be clearly competed away by that time without any legislative action.

harryVic 9y ago
No they won't. Even the cheapest electric cars cost three to fours times as much as a cheap gas car in developing countries.
- anovikov 9y ago
  That's now, this is because they are not massively produced yet. Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double, and electric cars make up about 1.2% of the market now. So, they are going to fell 3x by the time production volumes reach 36% of the current car production, or about 25% of then-current car production. But, they will actually own the market before then because cost of owning and operating an electric car is much lower than comparable gasoline powered one. Easy to see that this curve converges to 100% of market share with quite a bit of margin. At least 2x margin. There is nothing inherently costly in producing an electric car. Transmission is simpler because it doesn't need a gearbox. It has much lower center of gravity due to heavy battery so little mechanical trickery is needed to make it stable on the road. Electric motor is much cheaper than a complex ICE which also requires a lot of service. Only stumbling block is the battery - and they are getting cheaper every month. Most of the existing cost of electric cars is due to low production volumes as they eat away market share - there is a limit on speed of market adoption as well as factory retooling and business acceptance of the fact that electric cars are the future - but these are just technicalities, there is absolutely nothing preventing making a $15,000 mass market Ford Focus-like electric car, if built in Ford Focus-like volumes, that is.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    > Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double Where to read more about this law?
    - anovikov 9y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
  - holydude 9y ago
    We are constrained by electricity production and the cost of materials needed to make batteries. Electric cars ain't happening anytime soon.
    - anovikov 9y ago
      Not at all. There are about 250M cars in the U.S., each drives about 12K miles per year. Tesla makes 400 miles on a 100kwh charge, add 86% charger efficiency, 115kwh. That makes 860 TWh per year to replace all U.S. cars and light trucks with electric cars. U.S. produces 4060 TWh per year, so that's just about 21%. Sizeable increase, but that's fine: most of the charging will be by night when the car is parked at home, and by night, there is a big drop in electricity consumption so grid won't be overloaded at all. It will be the cheapest electricity in the world - just adding the variable cost. Same thing now, with about 24 average mpg an existing car makes, eats 10 million barrels of oil per day (counting 81.5% average oil refining efficiency), or more than 20% of entire U.S. energy use - all kinds of energy, that is 7x more energy (ok, about 3.5x more given average efficiency of electricity production). Even if that electricity was produced from oil on old-style single-stage thermal plants (a crazy idea - that would be the most expensive electricity in the world and no one is going to do that for sure), it would mean 2.7x savings. In reality, because most of that will be cheap coal and natural gas and renewables, there will be more than 10x savings.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Nothing but all those things just mentioned - the weight and cost of the battery, complexity of electronics and software, resistance to market adoption. The price has a large intractable stone in it - the battery cost. It won't go down very fast until new technologies are adopted. And it take a giga-factory to adopt a new technology. Rule of thumb: battery tech has to double the charge and halve the weight or nobody is interested in building the factory. The center of gravity argument depends upon the current heavier batteries - but e-cars can't take off until something like metal-air batteries are working. And they weigh just about as much as a gas tank does. As for complexity, sure compared to the mechanical engine it's simpler - 100's of parts vs a dozen. But the software has just exploded by orders of magnitude. Millions of lines of code instead of thousands. We mustn't underestimate this. Then, there's a core of car buyers that have to grow old and die, and be replaced by e-car enthusiasts before the market moves significantly. Beta-Max was better than VHS (for the old videotape guys out there) but it died simply by being too late. No, we won't see a $15,000 focus for decades.
- anonymfus 9y ago
  So the main emission reduction will be from the much less number of cars produced and used. Almost all big cities in the world have plans to reduce the number of cars.
greeneggs 9y ago
> Volvo doesn't plan to build any of them starting 2020 by the way "Around 2024" is what they said yesterday. "Volvo’s transition will be gradual. It plans to still produce existing models with conventional engines after 2019, but it will no longer introduce new models with the older technology. Depending on demand, Volvo will completely phase out cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel by around 2024." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/energy-environment/volvo-hybrid-electric-car.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/energy-environme...
- anovikov 9y ago
  Thanks for clarification. That doesn't change whole picture though. By 2040, there won't be gas cars on sale in developed countries (and they will be a minority even in the developing ones).
  - vbezhenar 9y ago
    Unless there will be a breakthrough in batteries with 10x capacity and 0.1 price, I won't change my car to electric, neither will many of people I know. May be as a second car for short city trips. Or oil price will skyrocket, but that's unlikely too.
    - derekp7 9y ago
      What about fast charging stations becoming more widespread? For example: legislation that requires all apartments to have charging outlets, or charging available on street parking. The way I see it -- plugin hybrids with a minimal 50 mile electric range will start to become the norm, then with fewer people buying gas, many gas stations go out of business. Electric charging pops up at work and at the big box stores. Possibly metered, or subsidised by purchases. Then plugin hybrids become electric only once the gas stations disappear.
      - anovikov 9y ago
        Plugin hybrid will be too costly soon, because it is unavoidably more costly than an ICE car (because it is an ICE car plus a lot more stuff) and will become more expensive than a pure BEV soon too as price of larger battery will no longer be more as price of gas engine and generator. That moment is already very close, most likely, it is already too late to build a mass market plug-in hybrid.
valueprop 9y ago
In related news, USA plans to stop using coal by 2300

harryVic 9y ago

No they won't. Even the cheapest electric cars cost three to fours times as much as a cheap gas car in developing countries.

anovikov 9y ago
That's now, this is because they are not massively produced yet. Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double, and electric cars make up about 1.2% of the market now. So, they are going to fell 3x by the time production volumes reach 36% of the current car production, or about 25% of then-current car production. But, they will actually own the market before then because cost of owning and operating an electric car is much lower than comparable gasoline powered one. Easy to see that this curve converges to 100% of market share with quite a bit of margin. At least 2x margin. There is nothing inherently costly in producing an electric car. Transmission is simpler because it doesn't need a gearbox. It has much lower center of gravity due to heavy battery so little mechanical trickery is needed to make it stable on the road. Electric motor is much cheaper than a complex ICE which also requires a lot of service. Only stumbling block is the battery - and they are getting cheaper every month. Most of the existing cost of electric cars is due to low production volumes as they eat away market share - there is a limit on speed of market adoption as well as factory retooling and business acceptance of the fact that electric cars are the future - but these are just technicalities, there is absolutely nothing preventing making a $15,000 mass market Ford Focus-like electric car, if built in Ford Focus-like volumes, that is.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  > Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double Where to read more about this law?
  - anovikov 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
- holydude 9y ago
  We are constrained by electricity production and the cost of materials needed to make batteries. Electric cars ain't happening anytime soon.
  - anovikov 9y ago
    Not at all. There are about 250M cars in the U.S., each drives about 12K miles per year. Tesla makes 400 miles on a 100kwh charge, add 86% charger efficiency, 115kwh. That makes 860 TWh per year to replace all U.S. cars and light trucks with electric cars. U.S. produces 4060 TWh per year, so that's just about 21%. Sizeable increase, but that's fine: most of the charging will be by night when the car is parked at home, and by night, there is a big drop in electricity consumption so grid won't be overloaded at all. It will be the cheapest electricity in the world - just adding the variable cost. Same thing now, with about 24 average mpg an existing car makes, eats 10 million barrels of oil per day (counting 81.5% average oil refining efficiency), or more than 20% of entire U.S. energy use - all kinds of energy, that is 7x more energy (ok, about 3.5x more given average efficiency of electricity production). Even if that electricity was produced from oil on old-style single-stage thermal plants (a crazy idea - that would be the most expensive electricity in the world and no one is going to do that for sure), it would mean 2.7x savings. In reality, because most of that will be cheap coal and natural gas and renewables, there will be more than 10x savings.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Nothing but all those things just mentioned - the weight and cost of the battery, complexity of electronics and software, resistance to market adoption. The price has a large intractable stone in it - the battery cost. It won't go down very fast until new technologies are adopted. And it take a giga-factory to adopt a new technology. Rule of thumb: battery tech has to double the charge and halve the weight or nobody is interested in building the factory. The center of gravity argument depends upon the current heavier batteries - but e-cars can't take off until something like metal-air batteries are working. And they weigh just about as much as a gas tank does. As for complexity, sure compared to the mechanical engine it's simpler - 100's of parts vs a dozen. But the software has just exploded by orders of magnitude. Millions of lines of code instead of thousands. We mustn't underestimate this. Then, there's a core of car buyers that have to grow old and die, and be replaced by e-car enthusiasts before the market moves significantly. Beta-Max was better than VHS (for the old videotape guys out there) but it died simply by being too late. No, we won't see a $15,000 focus for decades.
anonymfus 9y ago
So the main emission reduction will be from the much less number of cars produced and used. Almost all big cities in the world have plans to reduce the number of cars.

greeneggs 9y ago

> Volvo doesn't plan to build any of them starting 2020 by the way "Around 2024" is what they said yesterday. "Volvo’s transition will be gradual. It plans to still produce existing models with conventional engines after 2019, but it will no longer introduce new models with the older technology. Depending on demand, Volvo will completely phase out cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel by around 2024." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/energy-environment/volvo-hybrid-electric-car.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/business/energy-environme...

anovikov 9y ago
Thanks for clarification. That doesn't change whole picture though. By 2040, there won't be gas cars on sale in developed countries (and they will be a minority even in the developing ones).
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  Unless there will be a breakthrough in batteries with 10x capacity and 0.1 price, I won't change my car to electric, neither will many of people I know. May be as a second car for short city trips. Or oil price will skyrocket, but that's unlikely too.
  - derekp7 9y ago
    What about fast charging stations becoming more widespread? For example: legislation that requires all apartments to have charging outlets, or charging available on street parking. The way I see it -- plugin hybrids with a minimal 50 mile electric range will start to become the norm, then with fewer people buying gas, many gas stations go out of business. Electric charging pops up at work and at the big box stores. Possibly metered, or subsidised by purchases. Then plugin hybrids become electric only once the gas stations disappear.
    - anovikov 9y ago
      Plugin hybrid will be too costly soon, because it is unavoidably more costly than an ICE car (because it is an ICE car plus a lot more stuff) and will become more expensive than a pure BEV soon too as price of larger battery will no longer be more as price of gas engine and generator. That moment is already very close, most likely, it is already too late to build a mass market plug-in hybrid.

valueprop 9y ago

In related news, USA plans to stop using coal by 2300